The Four Movements
At Truth Resonates, we frequently write about what we consider to be wholesome versus unwholesome movement. We do not make this determination based on an arbitrary moral philosophy, applied granularly to every possible movement. Instead, we perceive four different broad types of movement that the human psyche is capable of undertaking: (1) seeking, (2) hiding, (3) clinging, or (4) shattering. For the reasons described below, we believe that of these four movements, only seeking is ever wholesome, and when we consciously choose to engage in hiding, clinging or shattering, we are in fact negatively polarizing. Each of these movements need not happen in isolation. At the deeper levels of spiritual growth, much of the work is in disentangling very subtle mixtures of seeking with hiding, clinging and/or shattering.
Seeking
Seeking is the movement of flexibility, inquiry and openness. It is an acknowledgement that we never have all of the answers, and each moment can be an opportunity to learn more. It does not mean blindly accepting whatever we read or are told. As with all movements, a movement of seeking can be more or less skillful. An unskillful seeking lacks discrimination, leading to recklessness or naiveté, whereas skillful seeking means integrating what resonates and setting aside the rest.
Seeking does not mean charging ahead recklessly or past our point of discomfort and fear. We can seek as slowly as is comfortable. The important thing is not the speed of movement, but the general orientation towards inquiry and openness — a willingness to learn and grow.
Hiding
Hiding is a movement involving turning one’s orientation explicitly away from growth, due to discomfort and fear. We hide in countless different ways. In some situations, we hide by forgetting. In others, we hide by becoming distracted. We hide from difficult circumstances and challenging outcomes; we hide from love; we hide from fear; we hide from our own self-worth; we hide from pain and discomfort. At a larger spiritual level, we hide from the immensity of what we truly are, which is All That Is.
As we grow in our spiritual understanding, we come to realize that we often coordinate our own reality to allow ourselves to hide, in order to generate distractions without having to blame ourselves for our childishness. For example, imagine there is a difficult piece of work that we ostensibly wish to complete, but really find it intimidating or tedious. We may initially procrastinate by browsing the web or otherwise distracting ourselves rather obviously.
If we tell ourselves the story that we are a responsible adult, eventually the cognitive dissonance involved in the rather obviously childish move will lead us to either start the work (seek) or find a more skillful way to hide. And so we may suddenly have a million small things that we legitimately need to do, and which suddenly feel much more pressing or urgent than they did moments earlier. We are now hiding more skillfully, in that we can at least convince ourselves that we are being productive.
If we come to consciously recognize what we are doing, cognitive dissonance once again leads many of us to eventually drop this particular mode of hiding and finally start the work. For others of us, especially for the more powerful unconscious magicians, we may turn without realizing it to an even more skillful form of hiding — we coordinate our reality, so that we keep getting interrupted. We all coordinate our own reality all the time without realizing it. We are always creating a reality that is a reflection of our internal beliefs. If we truly want to hide from a particular task, we will unconsciously use magic to effectuate that desire. Every time we ostensibly sit down to do the work, we are actually telling ourselves that we wish we didn’t have to do this now. We have an attachment to not doing the work (an aversion). Those beliefs then become manifest. Children pop into the room without warning; friends decide to call out of the blue; a sudden legitimately urgent new assignment arises that clearly takes priority; we have a fight with a loved one, leaving us focused on the resolution of an entirely different problem. Each of these is a means by which we are coordinating our reality to help ourselves hide, while giving ourselves plausible deniability to ourselves.
Busyness is largely an energy of hiding. Why do some people doing challenging jobs always seem so busy and flustered, while others seem to sail through the same work without difficulty and are far more productive? It is because the first person is coordinating busyness into their life as a way of hiding from the things they don’t want to do. The second person is genuinely doing what they enjoy, and so is not creating any psychological or magical roadblocks to their own success. That person is also learning much faster, since they are moving with an attitude of openness and inquiry.
Clinging
Just as hiding is a movement of turning away from discomfort, clinging is a movement of holding on to what is comfortable. For many of us, the things we know and are used to are comforting, even if they are unwholesome or unhelpful. We stay in bad relationships, unpleasant jobs, or unhealthy environments because we are clinging to what we know out of fear that the unknown will be even more uncomfortable than the present. We cling to unrealistic ideas of a better past, in order to justify the unhappiness of our current existence. We cling to the idea that our life is satisfying enough, and convince ourselves that we therefore don’t want anything more. We cling to our gods and our guns, our hatreds and the stories we are telling ourselves, because it feels safer than facing ourselves and exploring the unknown. It is comforting to tell ourselves that what we believe is true is what is actually and unambiguously true, so that we can satisfy our ego and be correct, while also placing ourselves mentally in a superior position to those who don’t recognize our own truths. All of these movements are movements of clinging.
Craving is also a movement of clinging, since when we are craving, we are clinging to the idea that the object of craving will solve our problems or provide us with happiness. We are clinging to the object as a ground, rather than doing the internal work to bring about real happiness.
At Truth Resonates, we believe that karma is an energetic attachment. If we have karma with respect to something, we are often either clinging to that thing directly or craving it. The other type of karmic attachment - aversion - is often a movement of hiding, although we often end up clinging strongly to the thing that we don’t want without even realizing it.
When we cling to a particular aspect of our experience, we prevent ourselves from experiencing anything better than what we currently know; we prevent ourselves from growing. We are holding onto a ground of security and safety, not understanding that when we let go of ground, we don’t fall, we float.
Shattering
Shattering is what occurs when we are overwhelmed. In that moment of overwhelm, our personality falls apart, shattering into countless pieces. In a real sense, we die a little death, since what comes back after the shattering is no longer what we were a moment before. Upon reformation, we once again choose in that moment one of the four movements. If we grapple with the overwhelm, we may begin seeking. If the overwhelm is sufficient and ongoing, we may choose to hide or cling, or we may keep shattering over and over again. This sort of ongoing shattering can be recognized as it is occurring — its hallmark is confusion.
We shatter at many different levels all of the time. Whenever we are overwhelmed, we are shattering. Whenever we feel frazzled, we are shattering. In general, most of us do not consciously choose to hide or cling or shatter. As a result, we need an “interruption” to our current personality in order to allow us to unconsciously choose into hiding or clinging. That interruption is shattering. Much of the process of spiritual growth is recognizing moments of overwhelm — moments when we are shattering — and consciously choosing instead to seek.
Polarization
At the beginning of this article, we noted how when we consciously choose to hide, cling or shatter, we are negatively polarizing, From the standpoint of Truth Resonates, positive polarization is any conscious movement towards love and unity. Seeking is always a movement towards love and unity, since the movement is characterized by an open and flexible state of inquiry and growth, in which our defenses are not activated. Hiding, clinging and shattering are always movements towards fear and separateness, whether they happen consciously or unconsciously. The opposite of love is not hate, it is fear. Love opens us up, brings us into unity with others, and gives us space to be vulnerable without loss. Fear causes us to contract, to build mental defenses and weaponry, to see separateness rather than unity, and to feel exposed and at risk.
All movements towards fear and separateness — all movements of hiding, clinging and shattering — are movements of negative polarization if they are consciously chosen. When karmas arise without our conscious recognition, we are not consciously choosing the negative movement. Instead, we are shattering from momentary overwhelm as the karma is triggered, and then reforming inside the karma, through movements of clinging and hiding. This does not give rise to polarization, since we are not making a conscious choice. However, once we are consciously aware of the movement into karma, if we nevertheless allow it to happen in the moment, we are consciously choosing separateness and fear, and thereby are negatively polarizing.
The path of spiritual growth is one of perceiving more and more of what is actually happening in the world around us, and thereby gaining an increasing amount of conscious choice in our lived experience. With each choice, if we continue to choose to seek, if we continue to polarize positively and move towards love and unity, then we quickly find that our process of seeking becomes a virtuous self-fulfilling dream, with every choice reinforcing the strength of our prior choices, propelling us into ever greater experiences of joy and happiness in the moment.
